A gender-transformative homelessness and violence prevention intervention, Safe at Home Hamilton
Melissa Perri is a doctoral candidate within the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and Leong Centre Studentship Recipient. Drawing on her work as a research coordinator at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions at St. Michael’s Hospital, Melissa provides an update on her current research which explores a gender-transformative homelessness and violence prevention intervention titled Safe at Home Hamilton. Specifically, she is working to understand how best this intervention can support children who are living in homes characterized by violence.
In Canada, on any given night, more than 5,000 women and children sleep in domestic violence shelters because their homes are not safe. Women attempting to end relationships with violent partners are often forced into homelessness and/or precarious housing situations, and often with their children. This displacement from their home and community has detrimental impacts on the wellbeing of survivors and their children. Current interventions that aim to prevent women from entering cycles of homelessness and housing instability do not always consider the needs of children, furthering harm. The long-term impacts of violence and homelessness on women and children can span generations, with children who are exposed to intimate partner violence being more likely to experience or perpetrate intimate partner violence in their futures.
My research aims to identify, for the first time from the perspective of those with lived experience the needs of children and teens who have lived with violence from a home-based violence intervention. I am engaging three stakeholder groups: 1) adults with lived experience of violence in the home when they were children; 2) the perspective of parents who faced violence, and 3) service providers of the violence against children sector within Hamilton, Ontario. This project utilizes concept mapping methodology, which allows a group of people to develop a conceptual model to understand a given issue from all stakeholder perspectives. Concept mapping methodology “enables a group of people to articulate and depict graphically a coherent conceptual framework or model of any topic or issue of interest” (Trochim & McLinden 2017). It comprises four phases of data collection: brainstorming (participants offering multiple ideas in response to a set question), sorting and rating (participants sorting and rating responses), and mapping (participants organizing responses) and integrates both qualitative and quantitative methods. I am currently engaging each of these stakeholder groups to understand what types of services and perspectives are most important in supporting children living in homes characterized by violence. The next steps are to finalize recommendations for services, which presently include options such as offering training for educators and health care professionals to identify signs of violence, ensuring children have a trusted adult present in their lives, and offering mothers and children facing violence access to emergency shelter. These findings will be disseminated as both published literature and as practical recommendations for existing services, including the Safe at Home Hamilton program.
Receiving the Leong Centre Studentship has advanced my scholarship and contributions to the housing and violence fields. Further, the interdisciplinary supports offered through the fellowship, including ample training and networking opportunities, has supported my aspirations of becoming a post-doctoral scientist.
